The crux of the division in the Democratic Party have been well discussed and are well known to readers of DL, so there is no need to go into them here. For a long time I thought that the divisions were something that could be worked out. I once naively thought that the abject heinousness of GOP misrule is more than enough motivation for all Democrats to come together. Now I’m not so sure. For me, the rise of wildcat teacher strikes is some tipping point evidence that we have two fundamentally different Democratic Parties trying to wear the same sweater. One Democratic Party wants social and economic justice, and one does not. I don’t think they can co-exist. The goals of the two parties are antithetical.
America’s “red states” are often thought of as homogeneous nests of parochial reactionary voters; it’s more accurate to say that their places that have been cruelly dominated by Republican lawmakers who owe their seats to gerrymandering and voter suppression that disenfranchises progressives.
That’s why wildcat, uncompromising, radical teachers’ strikes have erupted in four states that helped elect Trump in 2016.
What’s more, these are states where the far-right leadership has steadily eroded the power of unions, making them into something more like “associations,” with the intention of weakening their ability to collectively bargain for a fair deal for teachers — and with the unintended consequence of weakening the power of union leaders to divert or damp the radical sentiments of the rank-and-file, whose steadily worsening living conditions (these can’t be overstated, truly) have left them spoiling for a fight, with nothing to lose.
Alt-labor is labor without compromise and without leaders who can compromise: it’s cross-sector, unhindered by legal niceties, and it has nothing left to lose.
One important question is whether alt-labor will take hold in “blue” states — as Corey Robin points out, the liberal left was AWOL-to-hostile when teachers in Chicago struck over the same issues that these much-praised red state teachers are striking over — because the Chicago teachers were up against Obama’s right-hand man, Rahm Emmanuel. Emmanuel, like Obama, epitomizes establishment Democrats, long on the finance sector, long on mass surveillance, long on endless war and unchecked executive authority — but charming, cultured, and willing to say the right things on race and gender, provided that class is never part of the equation.
Consider the example of two Delaware Democrats, Matt Denn and Mitch Crane, when imagining the future of the Democratic Party. In these very pages Mitch Crane has said that he was once concerned with racial, social and economic justice – now he works for Pete Schwartzkopf. Denn worked for years to reconcile being a Democratic concerned with racial, social and economic justice within the constraints of a Party run by Tom Carper that holds racial, social and economic justice to be an anthem. Finally, he found that could not do it. I don’t blame him for making the decision he did. Life is short and he has a family to consider.
Whatever hope I had for the Democratic Party being the one that is “concerned for the little guy” grows a little dimmer each time a Democrat like Crane makes the choice he did, or Denn makes the choice he did. The cultural memory of the Party grows more distant and more difficult to access.
That’s good news for banks, and terrible news for the rest of us.
